Another Tasting

And the fall dishes keep coming. This tasting is all about two things: comfort and flavor. No boundary pushing, no fancy food, just pure flavors, simple presentations, and awesomeness of ingredients.

Chowder/Lentil Shoots/Scallop/Black Truffle Beurre Blanc

Duck Confit Pupusa/Orange Salad

Crispy Cavolo Nero/Grits/Quail Stuffed with Cannellini, Smoked Sausage, and Sage/Cacciatore Sauce

Corn-Thyme Crème Caramel/Pickled Figs/Duck Breast/Tiny Green Beans/Tasmanian Pepper Syrup

Orange Polenta Upside Down Cake/Coconut Sorbet/Crème Anglaise

"Spring"—A Chef's Tasting

We just did a Chef's Tasting on Thursday night with the theme of Spring. We decided to let the menu be informed by not only the ingredients that are available now in the spring but by the ideas and memories evoked by the season.

I am really pleased with this menu and think that it clearly states who I am as a chef right now and speaks to the food that appeals to me: simple, fresh, direct, highly flavorful, yet still a bit whimsical and playful, not too serious for its own good. I like this menu because the dishes are largely pared to their essence—not too many ingredients on the plate, but just enough. It is very difficult as a chef to pare dishes to their core: it forces excellence in the thought behind a dish, the ingredients themselves, and of course, in technique.

Sea Scallop. Spring always brings great scallops as new grounds are opened. I wanted to highlight our beautiful scallops against some of our local spring greens. The scallop is sitting on a purée of ramp greens and grilled baby spring onions and topped with a sugar snap tendril from my garden. The ramp bulbs have long since vanished into sopa de ajo.

Arctic Char. Spring always has me looking forward to salmon as it begins its spawning run up the rivers. It's just a little too early yet for salmon, but we do have two nice salmonids in house right now, arctic char and steelhead trout. Last week, we put up a batch of cured steelhead trout, so-called gravlax of steelhead trout, and we had a bunch of trimmings to work with.

On this plate, you see a mousse of roasted steelhead gravlax, fennel fronds from my garden, very lightly pickled hothouse cucumbers, seared arctic char, and a wonton containing gravlax, chives, and sour cream. The wonton came from wanting some crunchy element on the dish. And in the end, we decided to take the traditional bagel toppings and put them inside a crispy wonton as a somewhat cheesy (pun intended) nod to the God-awful crab rangoon served in ersatz Chinese restaurants. A little humor never hurt a dish as far I can tell.

Eggs, Bacon, and Toast. Now that spring has sprung and the days are getting longer, Sarah's ducks are cranking out far more eggs that we can possibly use to make our pastries. [Oh by the way, wondering why our pastries are so good? Blame the duck eggs!] So this dish was born of a need to consume duck eggs and of course also to showcase our awesome house-cured Berkshire pork belly.

Down on the plate, you see grilled and buttered focaccia topped with maple syrup-braised pork belly and a poached duck egg. We went through a dozen different plate presentations and finally in the spirit of consuming as many duck eggs as possible, decided to benedictify it with a lemon zest-augmented hollandaise. This sublime stack of wanton sinfulness is bejeweled with a crown of cilantro flowers from my garden.

Risotto. This dish didn't start as a risotto at all. For the longest time, it was just a list of ingredients: asparagus, morels, and duck confit. Our guests were very lucky that the first asparagus and the first morels of the year arrived in our kitchen simultaneously, lucky because they are ingredients that marry in the best kind of way. Morels, the king of mushrooms (you bolete fans are all wrong), deserve, no, they cry out for cured pork products. And what is better than cured pork? Our house-cured duck confit all poached in its unctuous duck fat bath!

So we had three awesome flavors that needed a neutral base to carry them and hence the risotto entered the picture, the rice marrying the ingredients and serving as a base for the garnishes: grilled asparagus, chive blossoms from my garden, and a morel dipped in cornstarch and crisped in hot oil. Ambrosial!

Picnic. I don't know what spring has on your mind, but a picnic is definitely on my mind. This dish is our homage to classic American picnic food: fried chicken, deviled eggs, and potato salad. Our fried chicken is an herb-marinated and grilled quail. Our deviled eggs are naturally quail eggs. And our potato salad, well, it is better than most potato salad you will ever eat, is instantly recognizable as potato salad, and yet, contains zero potatoes.

The potato salad is down on the plate letting us stand the boned-out quail up against it with the deviled egg halves nestled against it. Just under the quail and spilling out to the side of the eggs is an outstanding amarena cherry mosto cotto, cherry juice and grape must cooked down to almost a balsamic vinegar like syrup. To complete the cherry metaphor is a bit of dried cherry and celery salsa. Not only is it a great palate cleanser with the sweet-tart cherry working against the bitter crunchy celery, it is a reminder that cherries, that most delicious and first stone fruit of the new year, are just around the corner.

Oh, the potato salad. It's celery root, red onion, green onion, Surry sausage (our local Virginia smoked pork sausage), and parsley, all bound with mayonnaise.

Spring Lamb. No protein could be more spring in my mind than spring lamb and this one just arrived from the slaughterhouse. This lamb is so good that it really didn't need us to do much with it. I made a pesto from the tons of fresh mint growing in the boxes out in front of the restaurant and after boning out the lamb saddle, marinated the deboned loins in the pesto. In the vein of not doing very much with the lamb, I decided to serve it very classically, with pommes duchesse, mashed potatoes augmented with [duck] egg yolks and baked. Although you can't see it, the lamb is napped with a glace d'agneau, a highly concentrated lamb stock that we made from all the bones from the last lamb we received. It is so concentrated that it remains jellied at room temperature. We reheated it with a little white truffle juice.

The herbs I picked from my backyard in the morning. The lower herb in the photo is sheep sorrel which I included because lemony sorrel and lamb is a classic pairing, but also because I found it amusing to pair sheep with lamb! Corny, but true. The yellow blossom and the leaf above it is from a wild mustard plant. Lamb and mustard is a delicious combo. I often will drain the pan juices into a sauce pan after roasting a leg of lamb, add a little red wine, a little lamb glace, and then after straining it, will add Dijon mustard as a liaison to thicken the sauce. That, for me, is what the mustard greens on this plate evoke.

Rhubarb. Before there is any fruit in the spring, there is rhubarb, very much a vegetable, but one that we treat as a fruit. The only question here was how to provide a delicious foil for the sweet-tart rhubarb compote (rhubarb, cranberry juice, and sugar). Spring leads me to light desserts and light always leads me to Greek yogurt panna cotta, this one flavored with lemon zest and poppy seeds. For garnishes, you see a poppy seed tuile and lemon balm from my garden. The surprising element here is the black locust blossoms which had just opened for the very first time the morning of the dinner. I picked these from the backyard and just before serving them, tossed them in a dressing of honey, lemon juice, and lemon zest. The locust blossoms have a flavor at sweet pea crossed with honeysuckle nectar. They are delicious.

Veal- and Bluberry-Stuffed Quail

Been busy in the kitchen dreaming up new dishes for my weekly Chef's Table (5-7 courses $60 prix fixe including wine, Thursdays at 6pm, by reservation only). From last night, here's a quail stuffed with local veal and dried blueberries on watermelon radishes and mixed microgreens dressed with apple cider reduction dressing.

Smothered Quail, et al.

This is the next in the series of recipes from my Low Country Cooking Class last week. Smothered Quail is really just quail that has been browned on all sides and then cooked in a gravy; my family would call this Fried Quail (for whatever reason). This method of cooking is technically a quick braise (though without a lid on the pan) and is my favorite way of cooking rabbit and pork chops.

You might recognize this as the country cousin to an étouffée, from the French verb to smother. A Cajun étouffée is very similar in technique, but the roux is going to be darker and the dish will contain trinity (onions, peppers, and celery) and a lot more seasoning. Once you get comfortable with the technique, try an étouffée.

The method could not be simpler. Season a cup of flour with salt and pepper (sure, add cayenne and dried thyme if you like; you're the cook). Dredge the quail in the flour and then brown on all sides in a large skillet over moderate heat. Be careful not to let the brown bits in the pan burn.

Remove the quail from the pan and add 1/2 cup of the seasoned flour to the pan. You might need to add a little more oil at this point to make a good roux. Once the roux is mixed up well, this would be a good point to add any other flavorings that you might want. For my class, I added a couple of diced Surry sausages. I generally would have added sliced onions too, but for some reason I didn't last Sunday. No matter. Cook the roux until it is light brown, then add as much water as you need to make a nice gravy. Start with a couple of cups and add more as necessary.

Add the quail (rabbit, pork chops, Salisbury steaks, beef paleron steaks, chicken, whatever) to the pan and cook gently until it's tender enough to pierce easily with a fork. When done, season to taste with salt (remember, your roux flour was already seasoned) and pepper. I threw in a good portion of crushed red pepper and a couple teaspoons of fresh thyme too.

I can't eat anything cooked in gravy like this without rice and a big pile of greens.

Low Country Cooking Class

Recently I posted about how much I like to cook Cajun and Creole food. For my latest cooking class/dinner/party, I decided to tackle Cajun's cousin Low Country food, cuisine that's indigenous to the South Carolina coastal plain from Pawley's Island in the north, down to Savannah in the south. I haven't spent much time in this area, but as a Southerner, I have an innate feel for the basics of the cuisine.

Our menu was:

Shrimp and Grits
Pilau
Smothered Quail
Collard Greens
White Chocolate, Caramel and Pecan Bread Pudding

To keep this post from becoming book length, I'm going to give an overview here and deal with each dish on its own in subsequent posts. You can follow the links in the menu above to the article on each dish. And see the post entitled Grits 101 for the basics on grits.

The first thing to know about these dishes and recipes is that they are my own. I've tasted many versions of each of these dishes and these are my versions, informed by my sensibilities and the ingredients available to me in my locale. That is to say that I am treading on some sacred ground here: I'm not a native Sandlapper and I know that your grandmother makes the best version of each of these dishes. People have started small land wars over the "correct" version of shrimp and grits, for goodness sake. I have no wish to be involved in your little wars, so I make no claims about these dishes other than you will enjoy each and every one of them.

My shrimp and grits is made with very coarse grits from Anson Mills in Columbia SC. The all critical sauce for the grits is made from shrimp, shallots, green onions, Surry sausage, garlic, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, loads of fresh thyme, fresh parsley, lemon juice, white wine, and sweet butter. Sure, this is not how your grandmother makes it, but I love it.

I make my pilau in quasi-risotto style; well, maybe I should stop beating around the bush. I make it jambalaya style. I start with a mirepoix of onions, celery, and poblano peppers sautéed with Surry sausage, garlic, fresh thyme, and crushed red pepper flakes. To this I add Carolina Gold rice, tomatoes, salt, pepper, and chicken stock, stirring and adding more stock until the rice is done. I know others insist on having separate grains of rice; that's just not for me. Here's Randy chopping onions for the pilau.

Smothered Quail is what we would call in my family Fried Quail. This is my favorite way of eating both rabbit and pork chops. I dredge the quail in seasoned flour and brown all sides, then remove the quail from the pan, and make a light brown roux from the drippings and additional oil as necessary. Then I add water to make a gravy and put the quail back in and simmer until tender, about 20-30 minutes. Onions and pork products always help the gravy; yesterday we used Surry sausage. I seasoned with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and fresh thyme.

I can't eat anything cooked in gravy like this without rice (hence the pilau) and a big pile of greens. My preference is turnip greens (which we call turnip salad), but in the market on Saturday, we had nothing but collards, which also suit me fine. At the restaurant, we chiffonade collards, blanch them, and sauté them quickly in olive oil and garlic. But that just won't do for a good Southern dinner which requires long slow cooking of the greens with smoked pork products.

We ended the meal with a glorious bread pudding, puffed up to almost four inches in height. Here you can see Tim whisking the custard before we added the stale bread to soak. Into the mix went caramel, white chocolate, pecans, and the guts of a vanilla bean. Quipped one of the jokers in attendance, "A vanilla bean is what we use when we run out of vanilla extract!"

You've seen the photos of some of the husbands in the class at work, but none of the wives. And what were the ladies doing during our class? What they do best: playing the role of technical advisor from the back row! It wasn't really so, but I managed to catch them chatting while the guys were whacking and stirring things.

Just Cook

I love it when customers ask me to "just cook," to create a special menu just for them. Last night customers gave me an unlimited budget and total free rein: "we eat everything." Here then is their 11-course dinner with photos. I apologize that I am no photographer. How I got to be 46 years old with no digital camera skills is another story, but I learned a lot about photographing food and about Photoshop in this crash course. Old dog learning new tricks.

Minced Thai Chicken with Thai Basil Pesto in Thom Kha Coconut Soup

I love Thai food and have been cooking it for over 20 years. I like to reinvent and reinterpret dishes in the standard Thai repertoire, as in this dish which takes parts from Drunken Noodles, Larb Gai (minced chicken in fish sauce) and Gai Thom Kha (coconut and galanga soup with chicken). The highly seasoned soup reduced to a sauce consistency is plated down in the well of the plate, with a deep-fried round of sen yai (rice noodle) over that, and a mound of larb on top of that. Garnishes are a quenelle of Thai basil pesto, a Thai basil leaf, and chiffonade of kaffir lime leaf.

Wild Mushroom Salad with Country Ham and Crab; Ham Aspic

I wanted to stuff a big morel with a mousse of country ham and crab, but we're just a few weeks early for morels—I'll save that dish for some of my April menus. This is a "salad" of fresh sautéed yellowfoot chanterelles from Oregon with bits of country ham and jumbo lump crab. The aspic to the left is what is left from cooking down the hock from my Thanksgiving ham for about six hours—intense hammy goodness. Micro-arugula completes the dish.

Mussel Stuffed with Chorizo

Stuffed mussels are a common tapa; this version takes off on our steamed mussels with chorizo that we serve from time to time as an appetizer. I started by rendering some microdice of chorizo in a bit of olive oil. Then I used the colored and flavored oil and mussel steaming juices to make a béchamel. I mixed a bit of béchamel with chopped steamed mussels and the rendered chorizo, then stuffed empty mussel shells with that mix. I napped the top of the mussels in more béchamel, topped the béchamel with breadcrumbs, and browned the breadcrumbs in the oven. Chorizo can overwhelm many flavors, but I was surprised how complementary the mussel and chorizo flavors were together.

Tuna Sandwich: Tuna Sashimi in Disguise

This is one of those tongue in cheek dishes that I like to do when I get the chance. I split a tea sandwich-sized block of #1 tuna in three layers horizontally and then seared the outer two layers to just barely color them. These two outer layers become the "bread." I spread the lower slice with a wasabi paste and placed the totally raw center layer on it. Then I spread that with a miso paste and placed the top layer back on the "sandwich." A quick bias cut finished the illusion. The garnishes are outstanding shiroshoyu (white soy) and seaweed salad.

Braised Skate Cheek with Broccolini and Pancetta

Skate cheeks may be my most favorite seafood ever. We cannot get them very often, but when we do, they sell like hotcakes because they are so fantastic. We dredged the skate in flour and seared both sides. Into the pan went garlic, pancetta, and crushed red pepper flakes. Then we hit the pan with a good shot of white wine, sufficient in quantity to finish the skate by quick braising in the oven. When done, we added blanched broccolini, a tablespoon of butter, and rewarmed it on the stovetop, swirling the pan to bind the sauce with the butter.

Ossobuco of Quail on Carolina Gold Rice Risotto

While not a true ossobuco in the sense that the bone is not cut, this quail "shank" is braised and served in the same manner as traditional ossobuco, lamb shanks, and so forth. Its genesis was in a tableside conversation with a customer who inquired how many kinds of ossobuco and shanks we normally prepare in a year. The customer was eating a quail appetizer at the time. I started listing the ones that we do regularly (bison, venison, beef, veal, lamb, pork, etc.) and then spying the quail, I ventured, "I could probably do ossobuco of quail as well."

Here it is sitting on a bed of risotto that I made from Carolina Gold rice, an heirloom rice from Anson Mills. The risotto is colored with saffron in the classic Milanese tradition and garnished with microdice of pancetta and the immature peas from inside sugar snaps (mange-touts).

Rack of Rabbit; Braised Brussels Sprouts Petals; Virginia Corn Cake; Rabbit Demiglace

I love rabbit. It reminds me of being a kid and eating at my grandmother's house. She always knew that my favorite meal was "fried" (really, smothered) rabbit trapped on her farm, turnip salad (what we in the South call braised turnip greens) from her garden, and crackling corn pone (a hand-shaped baked football of white corn meal, hot water, bacon grease, and crackling—the crispy bits of skin and fat leftover from rendering lard). This dish is my tribute to her.

Here I have reprised that meal with a corn pancake made from local corn meal down on the plate, blanched Brussels sprouts petals finished in bacon grease over, the medium-rare rabbit rack on top of that, and a demiglace made from all the rabbit trimmings and offal (except the liver, which I grilled and ate myself).

Piquillo Pepper Stuffed with Picadillo Dulce of Virginia Lamb; Pimentón Sauce

The customer for whom I cooked this tasting had tasted my lamb piccadillo dulce (sweet and sour lamb) stuffed in piquillo peppers at a prior dinner and asked me to reprise the dish. When she tasted it before, we sat the stuffed pepper on top of a chorizo potato cake.

To reinvent the dish, I decided to invert it a bit. I cut two disks of piquillo and sandwiched them around a layer of finely minced picadillo in a mold. Then I froze the whole thing and enrobed it in a layer of pimentón-flavored mash. Next I blitzed chorizo and panko in the Robot-Coupe and breaded the cakes. After browning the cakes in a pan, I warmed them through in the oven and topped them with pimentón sauce and a mousse of goat cheese. Kudos to Virginia Lamb in Berryville for a world-class product.

Fan of Grilled Yak; Fregola Sarda Flan; Sour Cherry Demiglace

For the final savory course, I marinated a top loin of yak in herbs and garlic, then grilled it lightly and sliced it thinly. The yak strip is sitting on a flan of fregola sarda—a toasted pasta from Sardinia that resembles toasted Israeli couscous. I boiled the fregola and then baked it in an unflavored custard. The dish is garnished with sour cherry demiglace; the cherries are a segue into the next course, the first of two dessert courses.

Cherry Triptych: Deep-Fried Dried Cherries, Cherry Honey, Double Chocolate-Covered Brandied Cherries

Whenever possible, I like to present trios of dishes on the same plate, probably a result of old school thème et variations that my French profs beat into me in college.

Here we have on the left deep-fried cherries. Frying plumps them and caramelizes them a bit; they are addictive. In the back are three brandied griottines, wild cherries from France, enrobed in first white and then dark chocolate, and in the right forefront, a chocolate cup filled with cherry honey made from local honey (the hive is about two blocks from the restaurant). The cherry honey can either be poured over the fried cherries or consumed as a shooter.

Chocolate Trio: Three-Chocolate Bark with Marcona Almonds and Pink Sea Salt, Chocolate Macaroon Bar, Mexican Chocolate Soup

Back to the trio theme, I unleashed my inner Jackson Pollock on the three-chocolate bark, proving (with all due respect to Mr. Pollock and his family) that anyone can do it. The bark is made from a layer of dark and milk chocolate somewhat blended with a palette knife, with white, milk, and dark chocolate drizzled over. The bark is strewn with Marcona almonds and pink sea salt for flavor.

The chocolate macaroon bar is my take on a Mounds bar and the Mexican choclate soup is that amazing intersection of milk chocolate, heavy cream, ancho chile powder, and ground canella (Mexican cinnamon). I wish the chocolate macaroon bar looked neater, but it is simply too hot in my restaurant kitchen to do fiddly confectionery work.